Bell Direct
Share trading and portfolio management app.
Overview.
Bell Direct is Australia's largest non-bank share trading platform. We Make Apps worked closely with Bell
Direct's dev team to build a mobile app for their customers.
UX and UI
Mobile Apps
Complete share portfolio management.
Bell Direct provides a comprehensive suite of online share trading and portfolio management tools, covering
trading of Australian shares, a recent expansion into US shares, cash management accounts, ETF and mFund
filters, consolidated recommendations from leading advice agencies and easy tax reporting.
As part of Bell Potter, Bell Direct users also benefit from access to research and advice from Bell Potter's
financial advisory team.
For more than 15 years, Bell Direct has been providing their online share trading through their own website,
with a large internal dev team covering all aspects of website development and integration into the ASX. In 2020
they decided to expand their platform to include a mobile app and brought in specialist developers for the task.
Re-imagining the user experience.
Right from the commencement of the project, we realised that the mobile experience had to depart significantly
from the existing website. The web platform was very information dense and designed for laptop screens as a
minimum.
The mobile app turned that user experience on it's end - breaking down large forms into guided sequence of
screens with just the necessary inputs at each step. Tables of holdings and watchlists were entirely re-thought,
using locked rows and columns to allow users to swipe to the information they needed. Charts required a complex
integration with a specialist 3rd party provider to bring web-rendered charts into a native layout.
The resulting app, launched in mid-2021, has been warmly received by Bell Direct's customer base. The core of
the app has been white-labelled and used to power the Desktop Broker sister app and the share trading app for
another major investment bank.
Security, security, security.
The Bell Direct mobile app is handling extremely sensitive data. Building for security has informed the
development process of this app from the commencement of the project and is a continuing concern to this day.
The app has been through repeated rounds of penetration testing by analysts from one of the largest cyber
security teams in Australia. Annual reviews are undertaken to keep pace with the rapidly evolving security
environment.
This is definitely the most security hardened of all the apps developed at We Make Apps.
